Obama's Brinksmanship on Iran

Caroline Glick just wrote in the Jerusalem Post that "Under Obama, the US is no longer Israel's ally."

That is the most important headline to come out of the Middle East in my lifetime.  We are no longer Israel's ally.  It's obviously true.  Just read the news with an open mind.  You'll see it.

At the same time, two Iranian military bases have just mysteriously exploded, destroying nearly 400 ballistic missiles and vaporizing the chief of Iran's missile program, one Hassan Moghadam.  Nobody knows whether it was computer malware, internal sabotage, or a stealth missile.  Chances are, however, that historians will date the start of a major military conflict with Iran from this time in history.

Nobody declares official war any more.  When U.S. forces went into combat in Libya, Republicans demanded that Obama notify the U.S. Congress.  He just laughed at them.  The media said nothing.  The U.S. Constitution means nothing to his crowd.

When military malware like Stuxnet can explode missile bases, the line between covert and open war has disappeared.  Any Iranian technician who touches a missile these days had better say his prayers, because he cannot know if the electronics are infected to kill him.

Every time the Iranians think they've cleaned out the Stuxnet or Duqu virus, something else goes kaboom!  Like a biological virus, these things are mutating and hiding, ready to come out on command to sabotage something big.

My question is: why did Obama and the Israelis wait until this moment?  If we had these capabilities last year or five years ago, why not stop the Iranian maniacs from getting close to keeping the world at gunpoint?  Why wait until five minutes to midnight?

In Cold War lingo we are seeing "brinksmanship," the idea of walking a tightrope at the very brink of nuclear war to scare the daylights out of an enemy.  Obama is letting Iran get so close to the brink that he must have a purpose.  I believe that purpose is to intimidate Israel into making otherwise unacceptable concessions.  Leon Panetta and Hillary just twisted the rope again.

I'm not surprised that there's sabotage at those missile sites.  Since the Khomeinist regime has threatened a Second Holocaust for thirty years, I just wonder what they've been waiting for.  It's not just Israel that's threatened.  Any nuclear exchange will involve the United States within minutes or seconds -- to defend the Saudis and Gulf oil, for one thing.  To protect U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Gulf, and naval fleets on constant patrol near Iran.  In the daily chant taught to millions of Iranian schoolchildren, the phrase "Death to America!" comes right after "Death to Israel!"  The young people of Iran's Green Revolution turned that into satire by chanting back "Death to China!" "Death to Russia!"  But the mullahs and their robotic followers are fanatics, and they say what they mean.

In a world of space-orbiting missiles, the same ICBMs can hit Tel Aviv, Riyadh, London, or Washington.  Iran is launching satellites with the same missiles they can use to launch nukes.  When another one goes into orbit, who is to say what's inside?  You can disguise nukes as satellites until the moment when they come down.

It's just 15 or 20 minutes' difference between Tel Aviv and New York City.  Human beings can't make life-or-death decisions in twenty minutes.

That is why six decades of the Cold War were waged to avoid direct nuclear confrontation.  We fought proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East, but the U.S. and the Soviet Union carefully avoided any direct conflict with other nuclear powers in the entire Cold War.

And yet -- in the case of Iran, we are risking a direct nuclear exchange as soon as they get their bomb.  They've got the missiles.  They've got miniaturized warheads.  They are within months of an actual weapon, and nobody knows how close they are.  The CIA has always been wrong in predicting nuclear weapons, starting with Stalin.  They are batting a perfect zero.

We are therefore taking a strategic risk we never took in six decades of the Cold War.

Why?

Glick is obviously right that under Obama, the United States is no longer an ally of Israel.  But that doesn't mean the Arabs can rely on us either.  If you think the Saudis trust us today, after Obama overthrew their biggest Arab protector, Egypt, think again.  If you think the Saudis trust the rising Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, why is there massive capital flight from Arab countries to safe havens like Switzerland?  

The bloodiest war in the last half-century was fought between two Muslim powers, Khomeini's Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.  It killed a million people.  The Sunnis have fought the Shiites for a thousand years; they consider each other enemies of God.  The Turks, Arabs, and Persians have fought endless wars for ethnic, cultural, religious, ideological, and nationalist reasons.

Once Obama ran a wild bull through the china shop of the Middle East, nobody could know what would happen.  No Arab leader has trusted us since Obama demanded that the president of Egypt resign.  Nor do the revolutionaries trust us.  To the radicals we are infidels, and that includes Obama, because he does not practice Islam.  Obama may even be considered a traitor to Islam, and therefore worse than an infidel.

The Arab Spring is a fraud and a fiasco, leading to an estimated 25,000 Arab dead, with more dying every day in places like Syria.

Well, an American president has now elevated the extreme radicals of the Muslim Brotherhood to power over Egypt, just as Jimmy Carter raised extreme radicals to power in Iran thirty years ago.  How did that work out for ya?

In Turkey, a "neo-Ottoman" regime is in control, threatening war against Israel and the Greek half of Cyprus.

America and the West have actually colluded in the radicalization of the Muslim Middle East, a clearly suicidal policy.  Overthrowing stable regimes in a chaotic region of the world is a Leninist policy predicated on the idea that things must get worse to get better.  Such a belief has no basis in fact or reason.  It is a malignant fantasy.

The United States has therefore flipped against the only democracy in the Middle East, precisely as Obama and his radical allies have long said they wanted.  This is not an accident.

Obama's nuclear brinksmanship has to be political.  This administration wants to twist Israel's arms to the breaking point.  Obama has publicly demanded that Israel retreat to the 1949 ceasefire lines, left over from the War of Independence.  This is like telling the United States to retreat to the Thirteen Colonies.  It's a cover story for national suicide. 

Leon Panetta just repeated that demand, in case somebody didn't get it.

That is why Caroline Glick is telling the plain truth:"Under Obama, the US is no longer Israel's ally."  But then, we are nobody's ally anymore.  No sane person in the Middle East wants a radical martyrdom regime in Tehran with nukes.  Nobody.

Obama's gamble is enormous; not since Yalta has an American president sold out so many allies. 

But then, Obama has a Napoleon complex.  He has a deep emotional need to be worshiped by millions of people.  Napoleon was willing to invade all of Europe to satisfy his lust for glory.  French politicians like Dominique de Villepin still celebrate Napoleon's imperialism.

But no American president has ever acted this way, because they all believed in this country.  They didn't need to conquer the world.

Obama is an internationalist, like his professors, political allies, and friends.  Like the other Democrats today, who are now a radical leftist party.  Obama doesn't think like other American presidents ever have.

Like Islam, the radical left wants total control.  When they gabble about love and peace it's always with a mental reservation: love and peace after we take over.

This is a common teenage fantasy, of course, which is why the left is always renewing itself with ignorant teenagers who are easy to indoctrinate.

The left is a very ancient ideology, going back long before Karl Marx to the earliest imperial cults in history: China, Sumer, Egypt.  It's an adolescent fantasy that comes back in every generation.  Those adolescent fantasies explain the Occupy mobsters, made up of mental kids who can't say what they want out loud, because they knew it will sound ridiculous.  But those fantasies are driving them to poop all over our cities.

That's what you get when you fail to civilize a whole generation.  That's why Ronald Reagan said that the same battle has to be fought every twenty years.

The Bamster is a child who's never grown up, and his immature fantasies have been supported by all his professors and friends.  Bill Ayers' last book cover photo showed him stomping on an American flag with his dirty hippie boots.  He's never grown up, either, and nobody can make him.  The left is full of perpetual adolescents.

Which bring us back to the Iran War.  There is something terribly wrong, morally, about the nuclear brinkmanship emanating from this White House.  We are gambling with the lives of millions to realize the Napoleonic fantasies of an accidental president.  The phony "Arab Spring" has already killed tens of thousands, and the White House shows no sign of remorse.  The Muslim Brotherhood is winning in Egypt, and the White House shows no remorse.  Iran is within months of a nuclear explosion, but the United States is blaming the victim.

What's wrong with this picture?

I still have to believe that sanity will prevail in the end.  The Russians can't want radical Muslims with nuclear missiles next to their southern border.  Neither do the Saudis (who belong to a different Sunni sect), or even the Muslim Brotherhood rulers of the new Egypt -- which will look amazingly like that old, tyrannized Egypt of 1900.  The neo-Ottoman Turks don't really want a nuclear Persia next door.

No sane person wants it, and it's quite possible for a U.S.-Russian alliance to arise against the danger.  Jozef Stalin hated the capitalist West, but he hated Hitler more.  The prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully.

But the real question is why Barack Hussein Obama is gambling with the fate of millions of people to drive us this close to nuclear breakout.

What will he do with four more years?

I shudder to think.

(See also: Obama's Dream for Iran Becoming a Nuclear Nightmare)

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